Game|Life Podcast: Gaming’s Pay-For-Play Future

Call of Duty's Elite service may be considered a good value for the money, but it also clearly splits players into haves and have-nots.Screencap: Wired.com

Everyone’s talking about free-to-play games. But for the biggest game franchises, the future might be pay-to-play.

On this episode of the Game|Life podcast, Wired’s panel of exotic hybrid gamer-editors discusses two pieces of news from Activision Blizzard: The company’s recent round of 600 layoffs and the announcement of the first “content package” for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. We posit that they are more related than you might initially think.

But first, a bunch of wisecracks about all the different games we’ve been playing, from Wired magazine senior editor Peter Rubin’s descent into more and more casual fare on his iPad (this week: Solitaire), senior editor Chris Baker’s addiction to Drawsome and Marty Cortinas getting ready to dive into Mass Effect 3. Also I went to Disneyland.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted every Friday, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.